Inside Microsoft’s decision to loan the Dell buyout consortium $2 billion
Dell’s current expedition to go private is encountering turbulence in the form of investor discontent, leaving the details of the accepted deal somewhat obscured behind the smoke of shareholder battle.
Taking a company such as Dell private isn’t simple, given the vast sums that are involved. To that end, cash by the truck is required to purchase shares at a premium of their former market price to take the firm off of the public markets. Borrowed money, much of it.
Microsoft is providing some of that cash. Of the $24.4 billion deal, Microsoft is inputting $2 billion of its own money, as a loan. It will not take ownership of shares, accrue any voting power, nor have any say in how Dell operates once it is taken private.
Why would Microsoft take part in the deal? The company’s official statement is as bland as you would expect:
Microsoft is committed to the long term success of the entire PC ecosystem and invests heavily in a variety of ways to build that ecosystem for the future.
Microsoft is providing just over 8 percent of the needed funds to take Dell private. Why would it do that, if it will not pick up any control over the massive OEM partner that is ailing? In short, Microsoft is currently incredibly cash-rich. With more than $60 billion in cash and equivalents and short-term investments, the company can afford the loan.
And, the general scuttlebutt is that Microsoft is getting a pretty decent interest rate on the loan itself as well as using non-repatriated funds, allowing its foreign cash to be useful.
That said, I’ve been too loose in calling Microsoft part of the consortium to take Dell private. It isn’t. That’s Michael Dell and Silverlake’s business. Microsoft is simply their partial financier. Naturally, Microsoft has a simply enormous vested interest in the health of Dell. But it can’t get too close, at the risk of alienating the other OEMs that it depends on to design, build, and sell machines that run its software.
With the loan, Microsoft can forge a lasting friendship – hey, remember that time I lent you 10 figures? – help a key partner go private and rebuild, without taking on too much risk, and make a tidy sum on the side with funds that it wasn’t using in the first place.
The situation is akin to Keiretsu, but without the taking of shares. Still, Microsoft is placing its funds where its partners need them. The long-term bet should pay off.
And do not forget the tax implications of the Dell’s private move. As noted by Slate’s Matthew Yglesias:
Dell’s cash stockpile and current profits ought to make it a valuable company despite its poor growth outlook. But before those profits or cash holdings can be paid out to shareholders as dividends, they would have to be “repatriated” to the United States. Then a 35 percent corporate income tax would be levied, and only then would shareholders get their money.
Everyone wins in Dell going private. Except for long-term shareholders who think that its being taken private at a riotously, unfairly low price.
Top Image Credit: Sean McMenemy
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7 years in, Chinese social review site Douban is close to turning a profit
Douban, a Chinese social networking service for book, movie and music reviews and recommendations, has revealed that it now plays host to 100 million unique visitors a month and will be nearly profitable this year with expected annual revenue of $12.57 million (RMB80 million), QQ Tech reports.
The site, which was founded in 2005, has taken a self-described “slow company” approach, a rarity in today’s climate. In spite of its efforts, or perhaps because, its growth rate is picking up. Daily hits have almost doubled year over year to 160 million and the site currently boasts 62 million users.
Though the company has gotten credit for being China’s “truly original social network,” as described by TechRice, its originality has not been immediately followed by profits. It has also run into some trouble with government censors for the outspoken and sometimes rebellious community that has formed on the site.
Douban’s core business is its review platform and the accompanying social network. The company also operates Internet radio stations and has branched out into daily deals and ecommerce.
It brought in $2 million in its first batch of fundraising in 2006 and several millions more in 2009. Last September, the company raised $50 million in a Series C funding round from Sequoia, Bertelsmann Asia Investments and Trustbridge Partners.
Douban isn’t the only well-established social networking site that is struggling to make money. Sina Weibo, for instance, has become hugely popular but is itself struggling with monetization. Sina CEO Charles Chao said during a recent earnings call that a significant redesign is in the works that could better drive revenues.
Given the vast number of users available in the market, many Chinese Internet companies have opted to worry about their user base and profits later. The strategy has worked for companies like Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, but there are undoubtedly more failures than successes.
Image via Flickr / CarbonNYC
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How Technology Can Solve The Financial Industry’s Deficit Of Trust
Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Mike Sha, who is the CEO of SigFig, a free online investment management service. Prior to SigFig, Sha held various key positions at Amazon, including running product at Amazon Payments.
To say Wall Street currently suffers from a deficit of trust would be an understatement. In the last few years alone, the government had to bail out Wall Street to the tune of $700 billion, Madoff and Stanford bilked investors of billions, and ex-Goldman executive Greg Smith’s damning op-ed in the New York Times gave everyday people a glimpse into Wall Street’s profits over people mentality.
In response to the recent fiascos on Wall Street, the government decided to subject the financial industry to its most widespread reform since the Great Depression: the nearly-850-page Dodd-Frank act. This complex regulation is only part of the solution and is a reactionary approach to solving a problem for which the fundamental root cause is surprisingly simple: people no longer trust Wall Street. Regulation may restore stability, but it won’t restore trust. So what will?
The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer Survey found that more than 50% of people don’t trust the financial services and banking industries. Those results were poor enough to land both industries in the rock bottom two slots in both 2011 and 2012.
The flip side of this survey is that the technology industry was ranked as the most trusted for the sixth consecutive year. Why are technology companies 75% more trusted than financial services companies? Here are some of the things that have helped technology companies earn trust:
- Put Users First & Trust: Do what’s right for the user. Silicon Valley and the broader startup ecosystem has been raised in a “do what’s right for the user” culture which is desperately needed in industries like financial services, where the desperate search for profits has come at the expense of customers.
- Truth & Trust: The data never lies. Access to data, and computing power to crunch the data, enables the creation of high-quality, low-cost services that are highly accurate and infinitely scalable. Some industries, like search, are fundamentally built around data analysis, but as we enter the era of Big Data, we are already seeing the effects spread to other industries like health, advertising, retail, and more. Industries that have thrived on opaqueness, like finance, will be disrupted the most.
- Awesomeness & Trust: Focus on design and user experience. Well-designed, highly-polished products communicate to the user that a company cares about its product and gets the details right, which in turn earns user trust. Last year people shelled out over $125 billion to buy Apple products, but the emphasis on design has quickly spread beyond hardware. Software has enabled websites and mobile apps like Instagram, Pinterest, Fab.com, and Path to bring modern design to everyday life. But it’s not all about how it looks and feels – building services that are fast, stable, and bug free all add an overall feeling of reliability which also impacts user trust.
Several startups, including Square, Simple, and our company, SigFig, are embracing many of these principles to solve problems in finance and banking. At SigFig, we’re using data-driven advice to level the playing field between everyday investors and the investment industry at large, which thrives on opaqueness and puts profits before customers.
This tech-powered advice would be unbiased and driven by cold hard facts, not opinion or commissions. It would also be more robust since tech-powered advice could analyze thousands of products, unlike human investors who can only look at a fraction of that and whose attention is divided between hundreds of clients. Finally, this type of advice would be cheaper and more accessible to everyone, not just those with portfolios worth more than the $250,000 that many brokerages require.
As tax time approaches this year, it’s easy to imagine how ridiculous the idea of relying on a computer prepare your taxes would have seemed 30 years ago. And yet today, technology-powered services like TurboTax have made preparing taxes better, easier and cheaper for millions of people. Some day, hopefully soon, the same will be true across investments, banking, insurance, mortgages, and more.
Obviously, there is no silver bullet to win back trust; Wall Street will have to consistently prove it can be transparent and act in ways that show it deserves to be trusted. Still, we think that if Wall Street embraces technology, it will help to solve a lot of the issues that led to the distrust in the first place. If not, well, there’s a whole crop of startups that are embracing these principles and will change the industry on their own.
Image credit: Will Nathan, wmilesn.com
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